Creative Scotland Funds Photography Project on
Jewish Life in Scotland

5 December 2012

Creative Scotland has awarded a £50,000 grant to a SCoJeC-sponsored documentary photography project by Judah Passow, to record and celebrate Jewish life in Scotland. The award represents a highly significant endorsement from Scotland’s leading public arts funding body, and, together with the support of a number of very generous private sponsors, ensures that the project will be able to go ahead.

Judah Passow is an acclaimed documentary photographer, a winner of four World Press Photo Awards, whose work has appeared around the globe, and his most recent project, No Place Like Home, became a major exhibition at the Jewish Museum in London. The author Linda Grant said of this work, "The photographs in Judah Passow's latest exhibition explore the complex identity of British Jews with the clear-eyed humanity that marked his coverage of world affairs. One of the great photojournalists alive today."

Judah, pictured here at work in Sandymount cemetery in Glasgow
on Mitzvah Day 2010, will now bring his unique eye to focus on the Scottish Jewish experience. As well as visiting Glasgow and Edinburgh, he will travel throughout the country, from the Borders to the Shetlands, capturing Jewish life as it is lived today, and concentrating especially on the interplay of Scottishness and Jewishness.

Michael Mail, whose brainchild the Scottish project is, said: "The initiative arose because for some time I had been looking for a way of recognising and honouring the Scottish Jewish story – all our stories – and when I saw Judah’s exhibition at the Jewish Museum, I knew I had found my answer. The Scottish Jewish community has never been represented in this way before, and it may not be feasible in the future, but one moment in the life of our community at the start of a new millennium will be on the record forever."

We plan to launch the exhibition in January 2014 to coincide with the week of Holocaust Memorial Day, and after touring Scotland, it will be shown internationally in order to bring the work to as wide an audience as possible.